Emily Provance. Photo: .Mike Pinches for BYM.
A Testimony of Community: Rebecca Hardy attends Emily Provance’s Swarthmore Lecture
‘People have a desperate need to be listened to.’
At the end of January 2019, Emily Provance left her Harlem apartment, picked up her backpack and caught a bus to Ohio. With no keys in her backpack, ‘this was the act of giving up a home to go home to’, Emily told the 600 or so Quakers assembled in Friends House (with a further 470 online).
At the time, Emily thought it was a financial decision – a solution to, among other things, the struggle of paying her rent. It wasn’t. It turned out to be a spiritual decision that would have a lasting impact, transforming how she understood community, said the full-time traveling Friend, who now works with Quakers around the world and across the full spectrum of theological diversity.
So began Emily Provance’s Swarthmore Lecture, ‘A Testimony of Community’, organised and funded by Woodbrooke, the 118th lecture in the series, which dates back to 1908. At times moving, beautiful and gently enlightening, the lecture sometimes felt like a meditation on travelling, conjuring up the romance of a US road trip, which, to me, was somehow timely, with the Trump administration’s controversial crackdown on immigrants, and stories of unjust deportations and detentions filling our news feeds.
‘You’re going to hear a lot of stories about buses,’ said Emily, displaying the wry humour that threaded its way through the roughly one-hour talk. She wasn’t wrong – there were tales of being stranded for hours on highways after her Greyhound bus broke down, until a passing driver revived the group with bottled water and pepperoni pizzas – because she felt ‘people didn’t get enough love’. ‘And when you don’t get enough love, you end up with fear, and fear turns into hate.’
What has Emily learnt, in her six years of traveling (still living out of a backpack)? That, despite struggling with lifelong fears, ‘God transforms us into the people that God needs us to be – my experience is that this generally happens in the context of community. People invested in me.’
After giving up her home, Emily, a member of Fifteenth Street Meeting in New York Yearly Meeting, thought often about Jesus, who sent his disciples into the world and told them to stay with the people they visited, and not to bring food or money, or an extra shirt. ‘When I used to read that as a kid, I thought that just made Jesus a terrible boss, but then I grew to understand the preciousness of the vulnerability of experiencing hospitality. I started to learn – because I have fewer things than most people – how little stuff actually matters. And, as I spent time with human beings all over the world, I started to understand how much people do matter – and how incredibly beautiful people are, and how easy they are to love.’
People have a desperate need to be listened to, said Emily, describing how strangers have opened up to her, in a way that they might not with people they closely know. Leading a workshop on preventing election violence, she noticed that, because she was willing to talk about scary things, people started telling her about their most frightening moments. ‘So many people are scared – and almost everybody is self-censoring, because they’re afraid of what their family and friends will do if they know what they are really thinking.’ But often people’s fears are the same. ‘We feel alone when we don’t have to.’
Traveling often forces us into the moment, and teaches us to pay attention. I’m reminded of the Italian poet Cesare Pavese’s words: ‘Traveling is a brutality. It forces you to trust strangers and to lose sight of all that familiar comfort of family and friends. Nothing is yours except the essential things: air, sleep, dreams, sea, the sky – all things tending towards the eternal.’
‘I’ve started to see communities that I think other people don’t see.’
Although ‘a joy’, not ‘a brutality’, Emily’s roaming has had a similar effect. ‘I’ve started to see communities that I think other people don’t see.’ Her community is always one of the moment, and always transitory. ‘I’m always aware of the community in the grocery store… or riding on an airplane. We are constantly in overlapping, interdependent groups of people.’ When riding on a bus with a young family, ‘I have some responsibility to this mom and two kids because for that moment… we’re part of a shared community… [and] I get to decide how I behave in the context of that relationship.’
Being present with your community is about being present in the moment. ‘Communities exist whether we acknowledge them or not.’ There were plenty of other insights too. ‘If you really want to get to know someone, and make a heart connection… do not invite that person to the place where you are. Go to the place where they are… I learned this because I don’t have a place, I have a backpack. The only thing I can do is go.’
Perhaps the most affecting moment for me was when Emily described the Quakerly act of searching for the ‘sense of the Meeting’ in everyday life, beyond a Quaker gathering. ‘Can I be listening to the sense of the Meeting on an airplane, or at the Pentecostal Bible study?’ she asked. ‘Does it work if the people around me don’t know what I’m doing? And I think the answer is yes.’
With no agenda, it can be harder to discern, she said, particularly as some people might be manipulative or lie. But ‘that doesn’t mean they’re not telling us something we don’t need to hear. People don’t always speak with the words that come out of their mouths,’ she said, affirming the idea that ‘all behaviour is a form of communication’. It is still ‘part of the message that needs to be heard’.
There were moments of humour and surprise too, when Emily drew at random from the ninety-two minutes she had compiled after reading the thirty-eight books of discipline currently in use across the English-speaking world, as well as other Quaker historical documents. But perhaps the final one felt the most relevant. ‘When someone else’s words make you uncomfortable, think carefully before confronting them. When there is tension in the room, pause to remember the belovedness of the people you are with.’
The day after the lecture, in one of the Yearly Meeting sessions, one Quaker spoke of the lecture in discernment, and reflected on Emily’s words about sitting with people, wherever they are. For me too, the words have carried on, resonating – as Emily keeps on traveling, moving on.
Rebecca is the journalist at the Friend.
The full lecture by Emily Provance can be watched on Woodbooke's Swarthmore Lecture page: https://www.woodbrooke.org.uk/research/swarthmore-lectures/
